Blizzard
by Kaleyanne
Summary: Hina. A look at the last hours of a confused young girl who doesn't know what to do.


**Blizzard **

She made the journey alone.

The cliffs were not far from her home. The home was where she had just given birth to twins. A beautiful little daughter, her carbon copy. A dark, fiery son who burned everyone but his mother and sister.

Her son. Her son. Dead. Born not a day earlier, sentenced for crime he could not help committing. His sex chromosomes did not match. One was an X, one was a Y.

Therefore, he was killed.

Hina choked. A sparkly hirui stone fell from her left eye and hit her wrist before landing in the ankle-deep snow. A hole appeared, as the jewel buried itself deep inside the almost-frozen water.

Her baby son had not done anything, she thought desperately. If anyone was to blame, it was she. She met The Man on her way home from the Eastern side of the glacier. She had not known Men even inhabited the glacier.

She was young, she was foolish… The Man said she was a beautiful young lady, with her long blue hair and bright blue eyes. He said that Men had a special ritual they performed with beautiful young ladies.

She still didn't know why she agreed to let The Man perform the ritual on her. She still didn't understand why he had ordered her to untie her sash, or why he had slipped her kimono from her shoulders, or, or…

It hurt so badly.

She screamed. She begged him to stop. He had slapped her across the face. He burned her hands. Such fiery energy… The same fiery blaze she had grown immune to while carrying the child he left her with.

_My son… _Hina brought her sleeve across her eyes viciously, knocking a few more stones to the ground.

The pain had been worth it, she thought desperately. From The Man, from the birth… It was absent from her mind the moment Rui had set the children next to her on the bed.

_They loved each other,_ she remembered, stepping up her pace. She had demanded they both be on her left, she could see them that way. The little girl was in the middle. Her son had leaned over to wrap an arm around his sister. She had made a soft cooing sound and returned the gesture.

Just the memory increased the flow of her tears.

The jewels were falling as fast as the snow, leaving a trail behind the ice demon. They made soft 'splat' sounds against the thickening carpet of white fluff.

Her small cottage was in sight, she realized with relief. She reached down and lifted the skirt of her kimono, to give her legs more room to stretch, and ran to the door.

The pure white door was flung open, and Hina ran in, not bothering to shut it again. She ran straight for her bed and collapsed to her knees.

Hina crossed her arms on the mattress and buried her face in them, beginning again to sob hysterically. The trinkets were piling up again—bruising her cheek, poking her eyes…

_What's physical pain to the death of your baby?_ She wondered, shoving them onto the floor, to make room for the next round.

…

Hina awoke to the sound of crying.

"Oh, no…" the ice maiden murmured, pushing herself up and looking to the head of the bed, where she left the other baby. "My precious little daughter…" Hina murmured, reaching out for the fussy baby. "You miss your brother, do you not?"

The baby girl merely wailed in distress, eyes screwing up in a vain attempt to form tears… It wouldn't work. Little ice maidens didn't produce tears until they were almost a year old, and the tears would not crystallize until the age of ten.

And so the child's screams for her brother were in vain, as her mother's had been…

Hina drew her daughter to her breast, and rocked them both, back and forth. "There, there, little girl… It's okay…"

A lie. It was not okay. It was never going to _be_ okay. Her son was dead just hours after birth, thrown off the floating glacier by _Rui_, of all people… Her dearest friend, a traitor to her baby…

_She promised, _Hina thought angrily, feeling the ice-cold gems course down her cheek. _She promised she would deliver the babies and never tell… But she did, she must have, there's no other way the elders would know… _

"Oh, baby girl, what are we going to do?" Hina cried along with her child. "What can we possibly do now?"

Perhaps the little girl sensed her mother's sorrow; perhaps there was still a connection… Because these words, these sobs of her mother quieted the baby better than rocking or lullabies possibly could have. And Hina was grateful for the relief. She could not deal with her own pain and the child at the same time. And she could not deal with the child unless she had dealt with her pain first.

So the baby quieted, and looked at her mother with curious red eyes. Unholy red eyes, wide-open unholy red eyes, the perfect indicator of the child's cursed parentage. No ice maiden had ever had wide, red eyes. Their eyes were narrow, angular, and usually in shades of blue or gray.

Hina hoped that her daughter was not the product of The Man's ritual, but obviously she was… It had been hard to tell, she was one hundred years old now and it was time for her to have her first daughter. She still didn't know if the girl was her body's attempt to clone itself with contamination from The Man or if she really had been conceived along with her brother.

Hina closed her own eyes, a boring, ugly shade of blue. The baby's red eyes were like blood, running from an open wound. Frozen in a look of curiosity, and possibly accusation, accusation for not saving her beloved brother, the being she had been with from the very beginning of her existence…

The very same blood that must surround the body of her newborn, newly dead son, crashed, broken, beaten, battered by the miles-high fall to the jagged rocks below…

_Oh, God, what I have done to you, child? What have Rui and I stolen from you? _

Nothing, replied the baby, silent as a block of ice, silent as the tears building up once more in Hina's eyes, the very antithesis of the horrid, screaming blizzard raging outside, freezing her baby boy's blood…

Abruptly, she put the girl back down on the bed, and began to pace the length of the room. The child made a soft sound of displeasure at being so coarsely discarded by her mother. But Mother's eyes were wild, wild, hot blue, and her mind was beyond comprehension. The little girl ceased to exist in the mind of Hina, her thoughts were focused entirely on the little boy. Dead. Dead. Never to cry, never to smile, never to see. Never to be seen.

The ice maidens were saved. The abomination was dead. The elders celebrated, probably.

Hina could not cope. Her son had been her curse. Ever since she learned of his existence, she wondered what would become of her. What would become of him. What could she do? Abort the child? A male child would bring discord to the purity of the glacier. What if he grew up to be like The Man, his father? What if he performed the filthy, painful ritual on the good little girls? Then he would multiply. More boys would perform the ritual on the innocent girls and curse them all. Kill them all.

Abortion had seemed like a good idea. She very nearly went through with it. But neither she nor Rui could find a way to kill the boy without harming or killing the girl. If Hina passed her hundredth year without a daughter being born, it would be suspicious. If the elders couldn't find anything wrong with her, they would know she had aborted her daughter. And the killing of unborn ice maidens was strictly forbidden in the virtuous realm of snow.

In the end, she decided that she would have the child, and then decide what to do with him. And as the months passed, she found herself growing accustomed to the feeling of the two babies inside of her—kicking and playing together. She found herself thinking fondly of her children. Children. Not her daughter, but her children.

But the elders had stormed in not an hour after she gave birth and carried the boy off. Hina and Rui ran after them, Hina begging for his life, Rui begging for Hina's. The High Elder turned around and snagged Rui's sleeve. She shoved the baby into Rui's arms and ordered Hina imprisoned. Hours passed and Hina cried bitterly in her cell.

Finally, the elders opened her cell, and dragged her out to the cliffs. Rui was ordered to drop the little boy.

And something inside Hina erupted. Something burst. Something filled her, spilled from her core and rose to fill every bit of her, spread from her center all the way through her chest, into her mind, her fingertips, her toes.

Fear.

And love.

Her newly activated mother's core screamed and cried, and those cries were translated into real ones. Real screams that erupted from her throat, real tears that fell down her cheeks and froze in the wind. Real pleas and bargains and threats. Please, please spare my baby! she had cried.

But no. He was thrown, thrown to his death, away from mother and sister, who loved him so well. Down, down, down, to the end of a life so newly begun. To pain and death and shattered bones, and she never even held him, never rocked him, never comforted him, never told him what he was to her…

Well. She could fix that. She could find her son easily.

But before Hina could finalize her plan, before the notion became crystal clear in her mind, a soft crying sound again attracted her attention. Again, her girl child called for her, no longer able to let mother be by herself in her grief. Her daughter called her.

Hina scooped up the baby girl again, and again she rocked her. Calmer. Her idea was solidifying in her mind. It would do the trick, she would find her baby boy and hold him as she now held his sister. She would cradle him. She would kiss him.

The baby girl cooed anxiously, and Hina frowned. What could… Oh.

"You're hungry, aren't you?" she asked the girl, as if the baby would answer. "I suppose I am not surprised. You've never eaten, have you?"

A tender smile somehow managed to shove aside a fraction of the grief on Hina's face. But the sadness still lingered, and was slowly morphing to bitterness. She could find her baby boy—at the price of never again seeing her baby girl.

But it was worth it. The girl would live happily ever after, everything an ice maiden should be. Forever branded by her wide, bloody eyes, but an ice maiden, through and through. Pure. Safe. Happy.

Hina cradled the child, and nursed her, letting the child fill herself. Once. Just this once, she would indulge the motherly instinct with this girl.

When the baby was no longer hungry, she kissed her daughter's forehead, and laid her back down on the bed. By now, the little girl had come to realize that being laid on the bed meant that Mother was leaving her to herself.

This time, for good.

…

Hours later, Rui knocked hesitantly on Hina's door. No answer.

The elders accompanying her shoved past Rui, and banged on the door. No answer.

They screamed her name.

This time, it worked. Someone screamed in return: the child.

Rui opened the door slowly, again calling, "Hina? Hina!"

Only Hina's baby daughter and last survivor answered, wailing desperately now. She was hungry again.

Rui and the elders entered Hina's pristine home. Immediately, the High Elder walked over to the baby and scooped her up.

"We ought to take this one, too," she told her colleagues. "Obviously, Hina is an unfit mother."

But a blood-curdling scream from Rui prevented the other elders from answering. Quickly, they all rushed to where Hina's closest friend and betrayer now knelt: the far side of the bed, where Hina lay, unmoving. A frozen sheet of blood lay beneath her.

"Remove the body," said the High Elder with disgust. "Apparently, 'unfit mother' does not begin to describe this stupid girl."

Another elder helped Rui up. "You may dispose of the body as you see fit," she informed the stricken traitor. "I do not recommend burying the wretch. No doubt our pure snow would reject her."

The High Elder examined the crying child. "We ought to kill the girl, just for good measures," she mused. "See her devil eyes? Stamp out the whole line."

"No!" cried Rui. "The girl… she is one of us. Unlike the other."

"She was born with the other," pointed out the High Elder. "But if you insist, Rui, she is your responsibility. If she threatens us, we can always kill her later. What is her name?"

Rui had no answer. If Hina had ever bestowed a name upon her daughter… there was no way to tell.

The High Elder sighed and looked out the window. A lichen plant clung desperately to life off in the distance. Barely surviving the snow brought by the blizzard.

Snow. Plant.

"Yukina is your responsibility then, Rui," the High Elder repeated. She thrust the girl child at Hina and the baby boy's betrayer. "See that you fix her mother's mistakes."

And the elders left, leaving Rui alone with her grief.

And Yukina.


End file.
